The conventional 3D cameras include two stereoscopic cameras which capture a scene, each from a slightly different vantage point. The camera configuration is typically similar to that of human eyes; with two cameras kept at a distance to capture two different views with an overlapping view. However, the conventional 3D cameras have field-of-view (FOV) of approximately 85°, which is less than the FOV of a human eye. Also, such stereoscopic cameras do not help in achieving an expanded or panoramic field of view.
Typical 3D video cameras, produce a synchronized video from a pair of cameras (one right and one left) kept at a distance from each other. Such camera system is also similar to that of human eyes. The video captured from the right camera must be viewed by the right eye and the video captured from the left camera must be viewed by the left eye in order to create the 3D effect.
Panoramic videos with ultra wide-angle field of view may be captured using fisheye lenses. However, such lenses can lead to significant radial and scale distortions. Another approach to creating panoramic video is to use cameras with regular field-of-view (FOV) aligned to capture different overlapping images of a scene at a same time. The different scenes are then aligned and stitched to form a panoramic image or video.
For generating a panoramic 3D video, multiple 3D camera pairs are used to capture 3D image streams of a scene which are stitched together to create a panoramic 3D video. However, this causes parallax error which increases significantly with increase in distance between the 3D stereoscopic cameras pairs. Further, the requirement of iterative processing measurably degrades the image quality. Therefore, a panoramic 3D camera is required which can produce a high quality panoramic 3D images and/or videos.